The Dispute between the Nestorian Patriarch Timothy I and the Caliph al-Mahdi: Versions, Manuscripts, Editions and Translations

Abstract

This paper serves as an introduction to the forthcoming translation of the disagreement between Patriarch Timothy I of the Church of the East and the Abbasid Caliph al-Mahdi. It provides the historical context of the text, discusses the importance of the debate for the study of Arab-Muslim polemics, and explores its dating. Author provided additional information about Syriac and Arabic manuscript traditions and presented an updated stemma of these manuscripts containing the dialogue text. Additionally, she thoroughly reviewed editions and translations of the dispute in both Syriac and Arabic, and systematically analyzed differences between all existing versions. A general comparison is presented between the Syrian original and the nearest Arabic translation, which serve as the foundational versions of this text.